PIA23606: The Great Red Spot


The Great Red Spot

Caption:

Swirling in Jupiter's atmosphere for hundreds of years, the Great Red Spot is captured in this pair of close-up images from Juno's JunoCam camera. The giant storm churns through Jupiter's atmosphere, creating the turbulent flows to its west. On the west side of the Great Red Spot itself a sliver of red material is being pulled off the periphery. This is a recent, frequent, phenomenon first observed in ground-based data in 2017.

Two images have been mosaicked together by citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill to create this enhanced color composite. When they were taken on Feb. 12, 2019 at 10:24 a.m. PDT (1:24 p.m. EDT) and 10:29 a.m. PDT (1:29 p.m. EDT), Juno was about 43,500 miles (70,000 kilometers) above Jupiter's cloud tops. Features as small as 31 miles (50 kilometers) can be resolved in the images, allowing us to see structure in the interior of the Great Red Spot, as well as the fine texture of the white clouds in the South Tropical Zone below.

Background Info:

JunoCam's raw images are available for the public to peruse and process into image products at
https://missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing .

More information about Juno is at http://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Jupiter
System Jupiter
Target Type Planet
Mission Juno
Instrument Host Juno
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument JunoCam
Detector
Extra Keywords Atmosphere, Color, Storm, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2019-12-12
Date in Caption 2019-02-12
Image Credit Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing by Kevin M. Gill, © CC BY
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA23606
Identifier PIA23606